Marx Brothers Playground

For fans of New York’s once-ubiquitous trolley cars, Playground Ninety Six sits upon a site of great historical interest. This park opened in the spring of 1947 on land formerly occupied by the car barn of the Second Avenue Railway, a fortress-like structure that once commanded the entire block. Horses stabled here in the 1870s and 80s, powered Second Avenue’s first public transportation line. In the 1890s, electric trolleys supplanted the horse-pulled cars. When buses replaced trolleys in the 1930s, the car barn was abandoned, sitting dormant until its demolition in 1941.